Pando just announced an $8.5 million Series A to let individuals commit a percentage of their income to a “pool” and then share it with those earning less. But this isn’t about pay-equity. The product was built originally to balance the disparity between professional athletes that never get that big contract and those that sign the mega-deals. Pando tells TechCrunch that now they are pivoting and targeting high-risk, high reward career paths. From the Pando website: “The Professional Athlete. The Founder. The Student. The Technologist. The Financier. And so many more…”
The TechCrunch story starts with the two founders looking around while they were at Stanford GSB, “at their peers, some of whom may well be the superstars of business in the years ahead.” Eventually landing on “this idea of trying to create a sort of pooled insurance platform for careers.” But if you don’t start out with friends that want to share their future income, or that have enough income to share with their personal crowd, whether they be founders, students, technologists, or financiers you don’t get to be a part of it.